Review: With ‘If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,’ Halsey Boldly Refuses to Be Defined

“A girl says nothing. A girl keeps her mouth closed,” one of the Faceless Men of Braavos tells Arya Stark in season two of Game of Thrones. It’s a theme that courses through Halsey’s fourth studio album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, which homes in on similar notions of self and identity. The HBO series reportedly inspired the imagery in the album’s accompanying film of the same name, and that influence, fittingly underscored by icy synth stabs and staccato piano, extends to songs like the bewitching “Bells in Santa Fe”: “Don’t call me by my name/All of this is temporary.”

Those synths come courtesy of producer Trent Reznor, who, along with Nine Inch Nails cohort and fellow Oscar winner Atticus Ross, helped craft the album’s cinematic sound. It’s more eclectic than one might expect—a testament to Reznor and Ross’s versatility, as they hopscotch from driving industrial punk-pop (“Easier Than Lying”) to drum n’ bass (“Girl Is a Gun”) to hip-hop (“Lilith”). But If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power doesn’t quite match the dynamic, ever-shifting pastiche of genres that defined Halsey’s 2020 album Manic, and for some it will primarily serve to fulfill the curiosity of what it might sound like for Nine Inch Nails to be fronted by a woman.

That is, perhaps, a distinction without a difference, as Halsey uses both she/they pronouns, and like on Manic, the album’s myriad styles are bound by the singer’s distinct voice and even more distinctive POV. Despite its elaborate mythology and marketing, which included an unveiling of the provocative cover art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the aforementioned IMAX film, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is ultimately rather straightforward, reprising many of the themes—self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-empowerment—that have been central to Halsey’s past work.

References to Halsey’s struggle with mental health, including fleeting thoughts of suicide, are embedded in the flurry of subconscious lyrics that comprise the thrillingly candid “Whispers”: “This is the voice in your head that says, ‘You do not want this’/This is the ache that says, ‘You do not want him’/This is the glimmer of light that you’re keeping alive when you tell yourself, ‘Bet I could fuck him.’” The influence and isolation of modern life, and especially of technology, pervade that song and “Lilith,” on which Halsey, whose voice glitches like that of a robot, declares, “I’ve been corrupted.”

Halsey describes the project as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth,” and while there are few, if any, explicit references to motherhood in the songs themselves, a few lyrics could have both romantic and maternal interpretations: “Foolish men have tried/But only you have showed me how to love being alive,” Halsey sings on the delicate acoustic ballad “Darling.” There is, however, an overarching theme of feminism, specifically institutionalized misogyny, throughout the album, as on “You Asked for This”: “Go on and be a big girl/You asked for this now/Or everybody’s gonna drown you out.”

That track’s lilting hook is one of the album’s most indelible, accentuated by Reznor and guest Dave Sitek’s bed of shoegaze-y guitars. No singles have been released from If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power so far, probably because, well, there are no obvious singles here. The closest contender is “Honey,” a by-the-numbers pop-rocker featuring Dave Grohl on drums, and “Girl Is a Gun,” which, despite some trigger-happy clichés, boasts the album’s most fully realized melody. Of course, one doesn’t go to a band whose idea of a pop hook is “I wanna fuck you like an animal” for Top 40 hits, and Halsey deserves credit for, like Arya Stark, fearlessly refusing to be defined by anyone other than themselves.